Nathaniel has finally turned three! He continues to explore the cosmos, fighting boredom and learning new things.

Nathaniel and his crew stop for supplies on a Hammer-Face space station. The Hammer-Faces there have a favor-money system, meaning that all naturally indivisible tasks and objects are considered to be of the same value. Nathaniel does a favor for the Hammer-Faces by telling them a story, and they return the favor by giving him a bowl of food.

Nathaniel eats his bowl of candy sprinkles with a spoon and tells them another story. “So how did you get away from the Barts?” the tall one asks.

“We still had the numb-ray with us,” Nathaniel answers.

Eventually, the Hammer-Faces invite Nathaniel to visit nearby planet Hek with them. Frankfurt, the tall one, tells him, “It’s good that you never surrender. Good guys always fight bad guys. We know a place where you can be a hero anytime you want.”

Nathaniel is bored. His crew of Stuffians are bored too. They can barely stay awake. There is nothing new to do. They have done it all before. On Lectipas, they had entered numerous races, high-jumping contests, shoe-tying contests, eating contests, and breath-holding contests. Usually, they lost. They had climbed mountains and explored caves. The caves were always empty and after a while, all mountains looked the same. They repeatedly visited Planet Candy. They wore disguises in case The Mama-And-Daddy or some other adult was looking for them. The problem is that one can only eat so much candy before being full. They visited Earth (also in disguise) to watch whales, but most of the time there were no whales. Still fearful of the Fun Toy Syndicate, they avoided Gruezhe completely, but stopped at a Stuffian space station with a zero-gravity playground. That was fun for a while, but they soon got bored with that too. They stop on Soda (a Candy Wizard colony) to taste new flavors of soda, but find that the only new flavors are made for adults, such as kale, Brussels sprouts, and vomit.

They explore nearby planets, but most of them are lifeless and it takes days to travel from star system to star system. There are airless rock planets. There are airless ice planets. There are gas giant planets with no surface. Nathaniel catalogues and classifies them, but eventually starts seeing the same colors over and over. Gas giants can be bright yellow, dull yellow, bright orange, peach, grey, white, brown, striped, spotted, or striped and spotted. They can have rings, moons, or even moons with smaller satellites orbiting them, which Haticat calls “woons.”

Nathaniel keeps detailed descriptions of different kinds of mountains, cracks, and rain. He collects rocks of different shapes and colors, but soon he has every kind. Finally, they land on a planet with life. It is covered in jungle. There are no animals of any kind except for forty-five species of beetles. It’s very quiet. Not knowing what else to do, Nathaniel challenges himself to sit still long enough to count to one thousand. Finally, he finishes. “What now?”

The boys fly to planet Lectipas (planet of the Dinosaurs) in their new Extolon ship to discover that mosasaurs have somehow learned to burp in such a way to ignite their belly gases. They are coming onto land and starting massive forest fires. The boys become firefighters because being a good guy is fun.

They are brought from location to location as threats are upgraded and downgraded based on how big the fires are and how close they are to a village. While the Tyrannosaur tribes take charge of hunting the mosasaurs, all other species are assigned to firefighting duty. Ditches are dug, rivers are redirected, and trees are chopped down to make firebreaks.

Dinosaur adults, boys, and girls work together. Girls annoy adults and boys by giggling loudly. Adults meanwhile get more caught up in who has the authority to make a decision than they do with whether the decision is a good one or not. Rather than doing what they think best until another tells them not to, they do nothing and wait for another to tell them what to do while the forest burns and Nathaniel gets frustrated.